Corinthian Colleges has announced the closure of its 28 ground campuses just two weeks after the US Department of Education fined the student-debt-fueled institution for $30 million based on falsified job placement data and other fraud allegations.

Corinthian said it was attempting to help students find other
education outlets amid the unexpected closures of its 12 Heald
College campuses in California, Hawaii, and Oregon, and 15
Everest and WyoTech schools in California, Arizona, and New York.

The unanticipated closures will affect around 16,000 students
enrolled in Corinthian programs, AP reported.

Corinthian's revenue doubled to $1.75 billion amid the Great
Recession, from 2007 to 2011. The institution relied heavily on
funding from federal student loans and grants. According to the
company's filings, Corinthian schools generated $1.2 billion in
government loans in its last year.

"This has really exposed the shortcomings of federal and
state oversight, and the accreditation system," Pauline
Abernathy, vice president of the Institute for College Access
& Success, an advocacy group that specializes on student debt
issues,
told the Los Angeles Times.

"The fact that a school could be allowed to get so big and so
reliant on taxpayer funding — and to harm so many students
without action being taken sooner — really exposes the need to
reform the system at all levels."

In recent years, Corinthian, one of the largest for-profit higher
education systems in the US, has weathered steep cash shortages
and a host of fraud accusations, including fake job prospects
offered to students.

Last year, federal pressure pushed Corinthian to sell off most of
its schools to a nonprofit student loan servicer. Yet many of
those new campus owners were able to ditch Corinthian's liability
while former students with Corinthian debt were not bailed out in
similar fashion.

In recent months, dozens of former Corinthian students engaged in
a debt strike to protest the Department of Education's handling
of the dodgy for-profit institution.

“The [Education] Department has chosen to bail out the
company while sinking students in a lifetime of debt for degrees
that many experts have called worthless,” the debt strikers
said in March.

Then, this month, the Education Department
fined Corinthian’s Heald College for an alleged pattern of
distorted post-graduation employment data and other records.

Corinthian agreed to sell or close its remaining campuses, though
the state of California refused to drop liability for any
prospective buyers of Heald College, effectively blocking its
sale.

The company claimed Sunday it had been in “advanced
negotiations” with several prospective buyers to sell the
colleges and to allow partners to continue running Everest and
WyoTech operations, but the efforts proved unsuccessful.

"Unfortunately, the current regulatory environment would not
allow us to complete a transaction with several interested
parties that would have allowed for a seamless transition for our
students," Corinthian CEO Jack Massimino said in a
statement, AP reported.

The company also said its graduation and job placement rates
"compared favorably with community colleges,” and that
many of its students opted for Corinthian based on shortcomings
of the traditional higher education system.

Some current and former students are petitioning the Education
Department to waive their federal student loan debt based on the
department’s allegations.

Corinthian's nontraditional accreditation standards will make it
difficult for any student to transfer its credits to a community
college or four-year institution.

"The last two and a half years I spent going to that school —
the trouble, the time, the money I spent on gas — I feel like it
was a waste of time," one Corinthian student told the LA
Times. "I'm pretty much at a complete loss right now. I'm not
even sure what the next step is."

Representatives of California's Department of Consumer Affairs
will reportedly offer information sessions at many Corinthian
campuses this week to aid students.

In fall of 2014, the Occupy Wall Street affiliate Strike Debt
helped
purchase $4 million in private student debt owed by former
attendees of Everest College in turn freeing those former
students from a huge chunk of the burdensome loan bills.